Festivity is an essential theme in your films, and in Saint Jean-Baptiste (2021) in particular. Why did you decide to film this festival in Fillols?
I’ve always been particularly interested in filming festivities, because I think they can be a moment of utopia, in their capacity to exacerbate human relations and constantly redefine the contours of an exalted togetherness. But this doesn’t happen at just any festival, at least not one with organizers on one side and consumers on the other. No, for something to happen, the participants have to be the driving force. If they don’t take charge of the process, of setting up the festival, it can’t happen. They’re the ones who give the festival its deepest meaning and raison d’être. This is true of calendar festivals and pagan festivities, which are part of a cyclical, telluric relationship with the world, an attempt to explain and celebrate it. The festival featured in Festa Major is part of this tradition. That’s why I decided to film it, in addition to the fact that it’s the votive festival of the village where I live. Finally, it’s unique in that it lasts for five days, and this means it has to reinvent itself every day, becoming a “world festival”.
How are these age-old rituals staged, and what significance do they have?
The entire Festa Major program is based on rituals. They structure everything from the preparation of the festivities to the dances, the times of the balls, the music that enlivens them, the cooking of the grand banquets and the unfolding of the afterparties. There are also more carnivalesque moments, processions that penetrate the private sphere to make it public… It’s a framework that may seem rigid, but it’s these codes and habits that make it possible to let go. It is also in the preparation and execution of these rituals that the know-how of the festivities is passed on between the generations, enabling children, grandchildren, parents and grandparents to take part in the festivities and experience them together.
Festa Major doesn’t follow an exact chronology, but rather a sort of Dionysian movement marked by general shots of the village and its mountains. How did the film evolve when you were writing it?
These general shots of the village and mountains mark each new day of the festival. In this sense, even if the film’s structure creates its own space-time, it still reflects the unfolding of the festival. Right from the writing stage, the challenge was to reflect the duration of the Festa Major, with its ups and downs, without the film’s rhythm exhausting, wearying or tiring viewers, but rather drawing them in.
The festival is approached as a journey, with the emphasis on visual sensations, light and color, in an impressionist style. Was it a challenge to film this group, this community?
Even if I had an anthropological aim, I always wanted to film the festival from an immersive point of view, trying to get as close as possible to what we perceive when we experience it from the inside. The bursts of sound and light, the movement of the dance, the faces, the snatches of discussion. Filming the community in this way was possible because it’s the one I belong to, the one I live with all year round. This inevitably influenced the relationship of trust between the people filmed and the camera.
Editing was crucial in the making of Festa Major.
The idea was to construct a narrative that would follow the principle of a choral film. Even if there are five or six people who are a little more in the spotlight than the others, I wanted the community, through its relationship to the festival, to be the main character. In a way, what guided the editing was the passing of the baton between people who take the festival a step further.
You speak several times in the film, in voice-over, like a troubadour in a chanson de geste. Why did you want to intervene personally?
I wanted to assert my point of view more explicitly, to express the thoughts that go through my mind when I’m at the party, and thus step back from the effervescence of the present. I wanted to create sequences that would allow me to extract myself from this effervescence. I also gained this perspective during the editing process, when a hypnotic relationship is created with the images, which gradually cover up what was experienced until they take the place of memories. Editing is a time of solitude, as opposed to the collective madness of the party, and it was at this point that I wrote these voice-overs as an address to the spectators, but also to the people who lived the party with me and who are in the film. An address to show my love for this festival, for this village, for the people who live here.
The Festa Major is also “told through music”, as you put it. How did you envisage the use of music in the film, whether in or off?
Following a fairly classic approach, the three off-music tracks act as “commentary”. But the vast majority of the music was recorded live, and is the direct sound of the corresponding sequences. There’s Catalan music played by an orchestra, covers of variety and popular music standards, late-night techno, traditional and revolutionary songs… These musical styles are representative of the diversity of the Festa Major, of the permanent disguise of the festival. They accompany or transcend the emotions of the moment, punctuating the discussions, guiding the dances, amplifying the letting go. They are the sound materialization of our inner feelings.
What part of utopia is still alive in this festival and those who live it?
First of all, there’s the unrestricted occupation of public space from dawn to dusk, in a self-management style that relies on the trust of each individual to break free from safety and other norms. It’s also a festival that goes beyond the “entre-soi”, mixing generations and social classes. Last but not least, thanks to the fact that it is repeated every year, that the whole event is repeated every day, and that the children don the costumes of their parents and grandparents to perform the same dance steps, gestures and rituals, taking them a step further each time, the Festa Major gives concrete form to a cyclical concept of time, and thereby gives us a palpable sense of eternity.
One of the protagonists talks about his desire to pass on what has been achieved at Fillols. Is this film also about transmission?
I’m always thinking of the programmatic injunction in the title of one of the first direct cinema films, Pierre Perrault’s Pour la suite du monde [Of Whales, the Moon and Men, 1963]. In my own humble way, I always make films “for the world to come”. For me, it’s a question of recording gestures, know-how, the inscriptions of individuals or human communities in their landscapes, in order to preserve their memory. So that future generations can take this memory with them, so that they can continue to reproduce these ways of being in the world while reinventing them. I believe that cinema, as the art of recording the present, accompanies it, in its function as a transmission belt between past and future. And in its relationship with sound, light and color, cinema can magnify this.
Interview by Olivier Pierre
